A belly carpeted in flattened ridges may help legless lizards slither. Some geckos have only two tiny tabs for legs, so they wriggle and glide like snakes.

These geckos may propel themselves with microscopic corduroy-like ribs on their skin, Marlene Spinner of the University of Kiel in Germany and colleagues suggest October 9 in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. Unlike geckos with legs, which owe their sticky grip to spines on the skin, the flap-footed lizard Lialis jicari is spine-free ...